Following the shootings and arrests, Zhanaozen, home to the state-owned oil company, KazMunaiGas (KMG), was placed under a state of emergency. Authorities cut off Internet and communications access nationwide and the city was inundated with additional thousands of police. KMG has ongoing business ownership partnerships with the US-based multinational energy giants Chevron and ExxonMobil, which hold significant concessions in the country.

That same cold, dark December day at Aktau, 75 miles to the west, police cracked down on rallies held in solidarity with the Zhanaozen workers. Human Rights Watch documented that, "police detained about 100 protesters and took them to a temporary detention center ... Workers in Aktau reported heavy police surveillance at the protest, which was held in front of the regional mayor's office."

Human Rights Watch responded to the abuse of civil liberties by calling for an investigation into the use of state violence and called for the restoration of telecommunications services.

CNN describes the NDN's path this way: "The main route begins at the port of Riga in Latvia, from where freight trains roll across Russia, and continues along the edge of the Caspian Sea. It crosses the deserts of Kazakhstan and into Uzbekistan.... Other routes begin at the port of Ponti in Georgia on the Black Sea and at Vladivostok in the Russian Far East."

CNN explained what was carried on this new Silk Road: "About 10 days after beginning their odyssey, the containers cross into Afghanistan, carrying everything from computers and socks to toilet paper and bottled water."

The Pentagon announced the NDN on January 20, 2009, the same day as President Barack Obama's inauguration. At the end of 2009, in December, Obama announced the "surge" in Afghanistan, to the shock and awe of some. But close observers, aware of the new president's previously announced intentions, and aware of behind-the-scenes developments like the NDN, found the announced escalation far from surprising.

The ninth-largest country in the world, Kazakhstan borders the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan in the southwest, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the south, China to the East and Russia to the north. The country is also fairly close to key centers of current US geopolitical concern: Iran and Afghanistan. The broader region is also of vital geostrategic importance for its great-power neighbors - Russia and China.

For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.... America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.... Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and ... [a] power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions.

Brzezinski explained that the area is far too large to control through direct rule alone and alluded to the projection of what is now referred to as US "soft power" as part of the "great game":

That mega continent is just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically preeminent global power. This condition places a premium on geostrategic skill, on the careful, selective, and very deliberate deployment of America's resources on the huge Eurasian chessboard.

US hard power would also soon be projected into Kazakhstan, including the provision of weapons for the Kazakh military and police; unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones; construction of strategic military bases in neighboring countries; the contracting out of private mercenary forces placed in the region; and the training of the Kazakh military and policing force.

The Three D's: The US-Kazakh Chessboard

Heeding Brzezinski's "Grand Chessboard" advice, US foreign policy efforts toward Kazakhstan have centered less around defense and more on development and diplomacy.

Given that caveat, there has been no shortage of US-provided "defense" for Kazakhstan and the countries surrounding the Caspian when Washington's grand strategists have called for it.

"Defense"

According to USAID figures, the US doled out $17.8 million in military aid to Kazakhstan between 2006 and 2009. While a seemingly paltry sum when compared to that bestowed upon major recipients such as Israel and Egypt, such assistance has played a significant role in solidifying the relationship with the Nazabayev regime.

The Transit Center at Manas, according to a November 2011 New York Times piece, is set to close shop in 2014, when the US lease with the Kyrgyz government expires. Washington currently pays $40 million per year to rent space at the air base, according to the Times.

In Kazakhstan, US-provided "defense" has gone far beyond the mere sale of weaponry and has entered into the sphere of operational support and training of the country's military.

In 1995, the US Central Command (CENTCOM), through the National Guard State Partnership Program, initiated an exchange program between the Arizona National Guard and the Kazakh Armed Forces. The program aimed at "working towards expanding Kazakhstan's role in the [North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)] Partnership for Peace program," explained former Clinton administration Secretary of Defense William Perry at a February 1996 press conference.

"Theater Security Cooperation (TSC) programs are the centerpiece of our efforts to promote security and stability by building and strengthening relationships with our allies and regional partners and are an indispensable component of our overarching ... strategy," Hamlin B. Tallent, director of the US European Command's (EUCOM) European Plans and Operations Center explained in a March 2005 statement before the US House International Relations Committee.

A 2005 article appearing in Agence France-Presse explained, "The United States plans to spend a total of 135 million dollars within the framework of the US-funded Caspian Guard Initiative, which envisions improving the capabilities of the maritime forces of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan."

"Beginning in July 2004, Blackwater forces were contracted to work in the heart of the oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea region, where they would quietly train a force modeled after the Navy SEALs and establish a base just north of the Iranian border," Scahill wrote.

"Blackwater would be tasked with establishing and training an elite ... force modeled after the U.S. Navy SEALs that would ultimately protect the interests of the United States and its allies in a hostile region ... [serving] a dual purpose: protecting the West's new profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly laying the groundwork for an important forward operating base in an attack against Iran," he continued.

What Brzezinski described as placing "a premium on geostrategic skill, on the careful, selective, and very deliberate deployment of America's resources on the huge Eurasian chessboard" has many important facets, but all center around creating a stable, market-based economy friendly to US corporate interests.

The most overt example of this includes oil giant Chevron's entry into Kazkahstan in the early 1990s. The energy giant secured a major stake in Kazakhstan's huge Tengiz oil field with the creation of a partnership, called Tengizchevroil, between Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Russian government-owned LukArco and the Kazakh government.

Peace Corps volunteers taught classes at American Corners centers located throughout Kazakhstan, described by the US Embassy in Kazakhstan as "small, American-style libraries located within a local partner organization, usually a library ... [which] support local English instruction with an extensive collection of English teaching materials which are frequently used by local students, teachers and US Peace Corps volunteers."

Several former Kazakhstan-based Peace Corps volunteers offered starkly different explanations for the pullout.

In her November 18, 2011 "Eulogy to Peace Corps Kazakhstan," Rebecca Gong, now a graduate student at Harvard, offered what she referred to as "a long-suppressed insider exposé of all the issues." Gong honed in on the beyond-horrific experiences of women in Kazakhstan, explaining, "I don't think anyone expected, upon signing up for Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, that it of all places was going to have the highest rate of volunteer rape and sexual assault worldwide (if you were a girl who signed up for PC KZ last year, you had a roughly 8.3% chance of being raped)."

Another volunteer, Casey Michel, wrote about what he thought were the real reasons behind the departure:

It was the multi-level strains - from the [KGB successor] KNB's growing surveillance, to the impunity with which the drunks attacked us - that drove us from Kazakhstan. It was averaging one rape or serious sexual assault per month since June. It was school administrators allowing KNB agents to sift through both belongings and apartments. It was appointed government officials refusing to meet with Peace Corps administrators, out of either pride or contempt or grand-standing.

A WikiLeaks cable written in June 2009 confirmed one of these claims. It described a situation in which one volunteer, Anthony Sharp was, "arrested in what appeared to be a classic Soviet-style set-up, likely orchestrated by the pro-Russian old-guard at the Committee for National Security (KNB) and aimed at discrediting the Peace Corps and damaging bilateral relations."

The generation that has arisen as a result of the program has been referred to by State Department diplomatic cable as the "Bolashak Revolution." A cable unveiled by WikiLeaks reads: "Soon after independence, President Nazarbayev created the Bolashak program that provides full university education to over one thousand Kazakhstani students a year ... The so-called Bolashak Generation is apparent now througout [sic] the public and private sectors - bright, globalized, young people, almost all speaking English, who are in positions just a level or two away from decision-making authority."

Another diplomatic cable noted that the
"Bolashak program provides scholarships for several thousand Kazakhstanis ... where they absorb Western ideas and values. Additionally, Nazarbayev has brought into government service a new generation of young, ambitious bureaucrats, many of whom studied in the West through Bolashak or U.S. Government-sponsored programs."

However, according to Kucera, Bolashak is in its waning days. "With little fanfare, the government is phasing out the program as it launches another, possibly more ambitious educational endeavor: Nazarbayev University, a brand-new Astana-based institution that aims to bring world-class education to Kazakhs, rather than forcing them (or allowing them, depending on your perspective) to go abroad to get it."

Nazarbayev University: "A Number-One Priority"

The phasing out of the Bolashak Program meant, as Kucera stated, Nazarbayev University (NU) would become increasingly vital. A November 2009 cable revealed by WikiLeaks described NU as, "the government's number one priority" for Kazakhstan, after the development of the city of Astana.

Numerous acclaimed research universities, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, University College of London and University of Pittsburgh have partnered with NU to create programs in various academic disciplines.

These figures suggest that the university has one main purpose: the training of a handful of subordinate managerial elites allied with the US imperial project. A peak enrollment of 20,000 students is a high-reaching prospect considering the school's population was only 130 for year one, and is small beans in a country with a population of over 16 million citizens.

A Foreign Policy of "Killing Hope"

Going through the proper diplomatic public relations motions, upper-level US diplomatic and military officials expressed their sorrow about the December massacre in Zhanaozen and called on the autocratic regime to conduct an internal investigation.

One fact was lost on most media covering the massacre, but not on the International Energy Agency (IEA): the protesting workers were actually participating in Occupy Zhanaozen, inspired by and in solidarity with US-based Occupy activists. The militaristic hard-power tools that have made their way home to the US Occupy movement, it appears, mirror the ones that were used in Zhanaozen with US-supplied weapons, but with repression far more violent - and, ultimately, lethal - in form in Kazakhstan.

The takeaway: While there may be a US geopolitical long-term vision about the possibilities of reform toward an "open society," or liberal democracy, in Kazakhstan - a society aided by the presence of soft-power institutions and initiatives promoting a market-based economy - the reality remains that for now, US-supplied hard power will be used when US geopolitical aims are deterred in the slightest. Zhanaozen, unfortunately, is but a single example.

At the end of the day, US geopolitical interests and a corporate-friendly open-door foreign policy will always trump workers' rights and overall civil liberties in other countries. After all, if history has taught us anything, it's that the U.S. has an accomplished record of killing hope for empire in every crevice of the globe.

This article is not covered by CreativeCommons policy and may not be republished without permission.

Following the shootings and arrests, Zhanaozen, home to the state-owned oil company, KazMunaiGas (KMG), was placed under a state of emergency. Authorities cut off Internet and communications access nationwide and the city was inundated with additional thousands of police. KMG has ongoing business ownership partnerships with the US-based multinational energy giants Chevron and ExxonMobil, which hold significant concessions in the country.

That same cold, dark December day at Aktau, 75 miles to the west, police cracked down on rallies held in solidarity with the Zhanaozen workers. Human Rights Watch documented that, "police detained about 100 protesters and took them to a temporary detention center ... Workers in Aktau reported heavy police surveillance at the protest, which was held in front of the regional mayor's office."

Human Rights Watch responded to the abuse of civil liberties by calling for an investigation into the use of state violence and called for the restoration of telecommunications services.

CNN describes the NDN's path this way: "The main route begins at the port of Riga in Latvia, from where freight trains roll across Russia, and continues along the edge of the Caspian Sea. It crosses the deserts of Kazakhstan and into Uzbekistan.... Other routes begin at the port of Ponti in Georgia on the Black Sea and at Vladivostok in the Russian Far East."

CNN explained what was carried on this new Silk Road: "About 10 days after beginning their odyssey, the containers cross into Afghanistan, carrying everything from computers and socks to toilet paper and bottled water."

The Pentagon announced the NDN on January 20, 2009, the same day as President Barack Obama's inauguration. At the end of 2009, in December, Obama announced the "surge" in Afghanistan, to the shock and awe of some. But close observers, aware of the new president's previously announced intentions, and aware of behind-the-scenes developments like the NDN, found the announced escalation far from surprising.

The ninth-largest country in the world, Kazakhstan borders the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan in the southwest, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the south, China to the East and Russia to the north. The country is also fairly close to key centers of current US geopolitical concern: Iran and Afghanistan. The broader region is also of vital geostrategic importance for its great-power neighbors - Russia and China.

For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.... America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.... Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and ... [a] power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions.

Brzezinski explained that the area is far too large to control through direct rule alone and alluded to the projection of what is now referred to as US "soft power" as part of the "great game":

That mega continent is just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically preeminent global power. This condition places a premium on geostrategic skill, on the careful, selective, and very deliberate deployment of America's resources on the huge Eurasian chessboard.

US hard power would also soon be projected into Kazakhstan, including the provision of weapons for the Kazakh military and police; unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), more commonly known as drones; construction of strategic military bases in neighboring countries; the contracting out of private mercenary forces placed in the region; and the training of the Kazakh military and policing force.

The Three D's: The US-Kazakh Chessboard

Heeding Brzezinski's "Grand Chessboard" advice, US foreign policy efforts toward Kazakhstan have centered less around defense and more on development and diplomacy.

Given that caveat, there has been no shortage of US-provided "defense" for Kazakhstan and the countries surrounding the Caspian when Washington's grand strategists have called for it.

"Defense"

According to USAID figures, the US doled out $17.8 million in military aid to Kazakhstan between 2006 and 2009. While a seemingly paltry sum when compared to that bestowed upon major recipients such as Israel and Egypt, such assistance has played a significant role in solidifying the relationship with the Nazabayev regime.

The Transit Center at Manas, according to a November 2011 New York Times piece, is set to close shop in 2014, when the US lease with the Kyrgyz government expires. Washington currently pays $40 million per year to rent space at the air base, according to the Times.

In Kazakhstan, US-provided "defense" has gone far beyond the mere sale of weaponry and has entered into the sphere of operational support and training of the country's military.

In 1995, the US Central Command (CENTCOM), through the National Guard State Partnership Program, initiated an exchange program between the Arizona National Guard and the Kazakh Armed Forces. The program aimed at "working towards expanding Kazakhstan's role in the [North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)] Partnership for Peace program," explained former Clinton administration Secretary of Defense William Perry at a February 1996 press conference.

"Theater Security Cooperation (TSC) programs are the centerpiece of our efforts to promote security and stability by building and strengthening relationships with our allies and regional partners and are an indispensable component of our overarching ... strategy," Hamlin B. Tallent, director of the US European Command's (EUCOM) European Plans and Operations Center explained in a March 2005 statement before the US House International Relations Committee.

A 2005 article appearing in Agence France-Presse explained, "The United States plans to spend a total of 135 million dollars within the framework of the US-funded Caspian Guard Initiative, which envisions improving the capabilities of the maritime forces of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan."

"Beginning in July 2004, Blackwater forces were contracted to work in the heart of the oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea region, where they would quietly train a force modeled after the Navy SEALs and establish a base just north of the Iranian border," Scahill wrote.

"Blackwater would be tasked with establishing and training an elite ... force modeled after the U.S. Navy SEALs that would ultimately protect the interests of the United States and its allies in a hostile region ... [serving] a dual purpose: protecting the West's new profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly laying the groundwork for an important forward operating base in an attack against Iran," he continued.

What Brzezinski described as placing "a premium on geostrategic skill, on the careful, selective, and very deliberate deployment of America's resources on the huge Eurasian chessboard" has many important facets, but all center around creating a stable, market-based economy friendly to US corporate interests.

The most overt example of this includes oil giant Chevron's entry into Kazkahstan in the early 1990s. The energy giant secured a major stake in Kazakhstan's huge Tengiz oil field with the creation of a partnership, called Tengizchevroil, between Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Russian government-owned LukArco and the Kazakh government.

Peace Corps volunteers taught classes at American Corners centers located throughout Kazakhstan, described by the US Embassy in Kazakhstan as "small, American-style libraries located within a local partner organization, usually a library ... [which] support local English instruction with an extensive collection of English teaching materials which are frequently used by local students, teachers and US Peace Corps volunteers."

Several former Kazakhstan-based Peace Corps volunteers offered starkly different explanations for the pullout.

In her November 18, 2011 "Eulogy to Peace Corps Kazakhstan," Rebecca Gong, now a graduate student at Harvard, offered what she referred to as "a long-suppressed insider exposé of all the issues." Gong honed in on the beyond-horrific experiences of women in Kazakhstan, explaining, "I don't think anyone expected, upon signing up for Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, that it of all places was going to have the highest rate of volunteer rape and sexual assault worldwide (if you were a girl who signed up for PC KZ last year, you had a roughly 8.3% chance of being raped)."

Another volunteer, Casey Michel, wrote about what he thought were the real reasons behind the departure:

It was the multi-level strains - from the [KGB successor] KNB's growing surveillance, to the impunity with which the drunks attacked us - that drove us from Kazakhstan. It was averaging one rape or serious sexual assault per month since June. It was school administrators allowing KNB agents to sift through both belongings and apartments. It was appointed government officials refusing to meet with Peace Corps administrators, out of either pride or contempt or grand-standing.

A WikiLeaks cable written in June 2009 confirmed one of these claims. It described a situation in which one volunteer, Anthony Sharp was, "arrested in what appeared to be a classic Soviet-style set-up, likely orchestrated by the pro-Russian old-guard at the Committee for National Security (KNB) and aimed at discrediting the Peace Corps and damaging bilateral relations."

The generation that has arisen as a result of the program has been referred to by State Department diplomatic cable as the "Bolashak Revolution." A cable unveiled by WikiLeaks reads: "Soon after independence, President Nazarbayev created the Bolashak program that provides full university education to over one thousand Kazakhstani students a year ... The so-called Bolashak Generation is apparent now througout [sic] the public and private sectors - bright, globalized, young people, almost all speaking English, who are in positions just a level or two away from decision-making authority."

Another diplomatic cable noted that the
"Bolashak program provides scholarships for several thousand Kazakhstanis ... where they absorb Western ideas and values. Additionally, Nazarbayev has brought into government service a new generation of young, ambitious bureaucrats, many of whom studied in the West through Bolashak or U.S. Government-sponsored programs."

However, according to Kucera, Bolashak is in its waning days. "With little fanfare, the government is phasing out the program as it launches another, possibly more ambitious educational endeavor: Nazarbayev University, a brand-new Astana-based institution that aims to bring world-class education to Kazakhs, rather than forcing them (or allowing them, depending on your perspective) to go abroad to get it."

Nazarbayev University: "A Number-One Priority"

The phasing out of the Bolashak Program meant, as Kucera stated, Nazarbayev University (NU) would become increasingly vital. A November 2009 cable revealed by WikiLeaks described NU as, "the government's number one priority" for Kazakhstan, after the development of the city of Astana.

Numerous acclaimed research universities, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, University College of London and University of Pittsburgh have partnered with NU to create programs in various academic disciplines.

These figures suggest that the university has one main purpose: the training of a handful of subordinate managerial elites allied with the US imperial project. A peak enrollment of 20,000 students is a high-reaching prospect considering the school's population was only 130 for year one, and is small beans in a country with a population of over 16 million citizens.

A Foreign Policy of "Killing Hope"

Going through the proper diplomatic public relations motions, upper-level US diplomatic and military officials expressed their sorrow about the December massacre in Zhanaozen and called on the autocratic regime to conduct an internal investigation.

One fact was lost on most media covering the massacre, but not on the International Energy Agency (IEA): the protesting workers were actually participating in Occupy Zhanaozen, inspired by and in solidarity with US-based Occupy activists. The militaristic hard-power tools that have made their way home to the US Occupy movement, it appears, mirror the ones that were used in Zhanaozen with US-supplied weapons, but with repression far more violent - and, ultimately, lethal - in form in Kazakhstan.

The takeaway: While there may be a US geopolitical long-term vision about the possibilities of reform toward an "open society," or liberal democracy, in Kazakhstan - a society aided by the presence of soft-power institutions and initiatives promoting a market-based economy - the reality remains that for now, US-supplied hard power will be used when US geopolitical aims are deterred in the slightest. Zhanaozen, unfortunately, is but a single example.

At the end of the day, US geopolitical interests and a corporate-friendly open-door foreign policy will always trump workers' rights and overall civil liberties in other countries. After all, if history has taught us anything, it's that the U.S. has an accomplished record of killing hope for empire in every crevice of the globe.

This article is not covered by CreativeCommons policy and may not be republished without permission.